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Apr200829

I only installed the tracking script less than an hour ago but I love it already. If you are like me and are addicted to reading your Google Analytics stats then stay away from Woopra.

Currently in Beta, it is free software that allows you to track visitors to your website in real-time. It shows a tremendous amount of detail about who is on your site. What country they are in, which browser they are using, what language they speak, what the local time is, how they arrived at your site (search engine and keyword) and much more.

The best part is being able to follow your visitors around and watch as they navigate from page to page. You can even send them messages which pop-up on their browser but I doubt anyone would really want to do that, It is already possible to learn all this in Google analytics, of course, but there’s something about doing it live that seems so much more revealing.

Woopra also keeps track of all these stats and more including the most popular pages, keywords searched, files downloaded, page views per visit, hourly visits, etc etc.A ticker runs at the bottom of the browser showing statistics such as Page views today, time spent per page, visits, new visitors, along with stock market style red and green change indicators.

Woopra allows you to ‘tag’ visitors so that you can keep a record of what they do in the future, though I couldn’t seem to get this to work properly. Another feature is the ability to set up predefined alerts. For example, you could have Woopra play a sound whenever someone lands on a particular web page, or signs up for your rss feed. The alerts are highly configurable to the point where you could set up a rule that says, for example: Alert me every time a visitor from Denver Colorado with a screen size greater than 800 X 600 visits my ‘about’ page during the day.

As slick as it looks there are some clear signs that it is still in Beta, for example, every visitor is recorded as having been on the site for 0 seconds no matter how long they stay.

As with all such tracking codes you install it by adding about three lines of code to the footer of the pages you want to track. I did this by doing a search and replace on my entire site. Unfortunately, as it is still in beta you have your website approved manually to use Woopra. I sent a request about a month ago, and just got my approval to today.

I presume that woopra will become a pay service at some point in the future but it’s free for now at least.

Update: October 2009: Woopra is now out of Beta and open to new users.

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Apr200829

Need to find out which keywords are sending traffic to a particular site? Enter URL here and you will get a report of all the keywords found in Google’s index, how much competition that word has and where the site is positioned in the search result. It’s also a good way to judge your own sites importance by how many times your site shows up in Google’s index.

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Apr200828

Microsoft’s Keyword Forecasting tool attempts to predict how many searches a keyword will get in the future based on past performace. The above graph shows the prediction for a search on the name “Obama”

It even breaks down the demographic data and shows you the data based on age and sex.

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Apr200825

Spyfu allows you to spy on your competitors’ ad campaign spending habits. Enter a domain and you are presented with a wealth of information. According to this search, Flickr spent about $6,000 in April 2007 and very little since.

You will also learn how many ad competitors they had, clicks per day, average cost per click, Average position, organic results, ads and more. It’s hard to know how accurate it is, I suppose you could test it with your site if you run any PPC campaigns.